I first mentioned this film back in 2011 on this post, but I finally got around to seeing Celine Dahnier's "Blank City" last night, and it pretty much blew me off the couch.
When it comes to documentaries about No Wave, the pickings are mighty slim. There's Scott Crary's "Kill Your Idols" from 2006 (which I've lambasted here before), but that's ultimately like the "Full Metal Jacket" of No Wave docs; it's half a good film. Beyond that, you're largely left with several rote documentaries about Punk that cram in a few bits about No Wave when not waxing rhapsodic about how nothing really happened between the death of Sid Vicious and the rise of Nirvana.
But "Blank City" is wonderfully exhaustive on the sprawling, creative collision of film, music and art in New York City during the late 70's and into the 80's, touching on Punk, No Wave, the Cinema of Transgression and beyond. Along the way, Dahnier lands incisive interviews with luminaries like Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, Glenn O'Brien, Lydia Lunch, Amos Poe, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, James Chance, Patti Astor, Deborah Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, Lung Leg, Nick Zedd, Anne Magnuson, Kembra Pfahler and many, many more. Its attention to detail is impressive and illuminating, drawing the parallels between the insouciant frontier spirit of the all the artists of the period across the board, be they filmmaker or musician or both (and, in most cases, they usually were both).
"Blank City" also lovingly captures that period of New York City with both reverence and unblinking clarity -- yes, it was a hotbed of parameterless creativity, but it was also crime-ridden squalor.
Even if you're not a smelly music dork or an esoteric cinema head, "Blank City" is entirely fascinating. Seek it out at once. It's on Netflix. Go fetch. Now.
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